Admittedly, I'm a hostile witness, but I think it's fair to say that
in the world view of the egalitarian Left, if you are presented with a
small ethnic group which enjoys higher incomes, better health, greater
educational attainment, and so forth, across the entire panoply of social
measures, that group would be considered an elite, and would be assumed
to have achieved their position at the expense of others. So what
are we to make of a book by a radical, feminist, lesbian, Asian American,
which dwells at length on the deleterious effects of racial oppression
on America's Asian population, which just happens to be that elite group
? Predictably, given the divergence of socioeconomic reality
from the author's subject, the resulting book is rather uneven.

In this pronouncedly personal vision of race relations as they have
impacted Asian American in the United States, Helen Zia mixes personal
memoir, a brief history of Asian immigration and systematic discrimination
against Asians, and then a series of vignettes from the past twenty years
which, in her view, have resulted in the politicization of the Asian American
community. Her personal recollections are so anecdotal that they
don't add much to the book. The historical section is very interesting
and, since it pertains to the period during which white America truly did
oppress Asian immigrants, is important for all Americans to recall, even
as we recall the similarly ugly treatment of blacks, Hispanics, Jews, the
Irish, etc. But the chapters on recent events very nearly border
on the trivial, at least in so far as they are intended to reflect continuing
discrimination against Asian Americans.

We must all cringe at the alternately subservient or malevolent portrayals
of Asians in old movies and fiction, but an entire chapter on the controversy
over Jonathan Pryce playing a Eurasian in Miss Saigon ? And
what is the point of the whole episode ? If whites can not play Asian
roles, should Asians be banned from white parts ? Who will be hurt
more by such a standard ?

There's also a chapter on the righteous struggle of New York City cab
drivers against Rudy Guliani and his attempts to impose safety standards
on them. Even with a predominance of those drivers being Asians,
it's awfully hard to see either Guliani's actions as racially motivated,
or the resistance to him as a great civil rights issue.

Truly odd is the chapter on the fight for same sex marriages in Hawaii.
While this battle is cast as a political awakening and moment of bonding
among Asian Americans, the referendum did lose 70%-30% in a state which
is predominantly Asian American.

Meanwhile, the most interesting chapters concern the literal battles
between black patrons and Korean grocers in New York and Los Angeles.
Of course, this conflict between minorities does little to advance an argument
about white discrimination against Asians, while raising important--and
insufficiently dealt with here--questions about the racism of these minority
groups. Similarly, an underdeveloped plot line that keeps cropping
up in the book is the differences, even antagonisms, between the various
ethnicities which comprise the broader grouping of "Asian American."
This is particularly evident in the ambivalent reaction of other Asian
groups to the difficulties of the Korean store owners. Entirely absent
is any sense of the historical animosities among the several groups--Japanese,
Chinese, Indian, Korean, Vietnamese, etc.. Zia's hesitancy to get
involved in all these issues, though understandable, leaves much fertile
ground unplowed.

Completely unacceptable is the author's stated reason for writing the
book :

QUESTION: What inspired you to write this book?

ANSWER: I felt we were being catapulted back to the
1800s [by portrayals of
Asians in the media and by public officials. Despite] the last 50 years
of hard
work, growing consciousness, the evolution of this community, all of a
sudden
people were wondering, 'What are these foreigners doing in the White House?
Are they all spies from China' I realized how little the public, our public
officials, know about us. So I really was writing it for the general American
population, in which I would also include the Asian-Americans.

The assertion that both the Chinagate fund raising scandal and the Wen
Ho Lee case were products of racism, is itself a form of race baiting,
intended to silence people by impugning their motives. I have little
doubt that the Clintons fed their Asian donors to the wolves, hoping to
deflect attention from their own misdeeds, and their allies in Congress
and the media were only too happy to exploit them. Nor do I doubt
that the fact that so many of those implicated were Asians helped to give
the whole mess a certain exotic flavor (who will ever forget the video
of Al Gore at the Buddhist Temple?) But the fact remains that Asians,
Asian Americans, and the Chinese Government were deeply involved.
How could responsible law enforcement officials not focus on the interlocking
connections and the possibility that American National security had been
bartered for campaign cash ?

Likewise, it would be ridiculous to argue that Wen Ho Lee's ethnicity
did not count against him when the Los Alamos security breaches were discovered,
but the fact remains that he repeatedly and massively violated security
procedures. Moreover, he'd
been under suspicion for several years because of other questionable behavior.
Given these factors and the knowledge that China had made America's nuclear
secrets a top target of its intelligence operations, how could Lee not
be a target of the investigation ? No, neither of these dogs will
hunt. There were certainly excesses in the media coverage of, and
political rhetoric about, these scandals, and where all Asian Americans
were tarred with an overbroad brush it should not be tolerated. But
as a general matter the ethnicity of the suspects in these cases was incidental
and the hysteria would have been no different had they been Russians at
the height of the Cold War. (And it is important to recognize, as
Zia does not, that China is now the primary remaining enemy of democracy
generally and of America in particular.)

There's enough here that's interesting, and underreported in the mainstream
media, to make the book worth reading. But the subject really deserves
a fuller and more objective treatment than it gets here. As Asian
Americans become an ever greater portion of the population and begin to
flex their political and economic muscle, it is all to the good for the
rest of America to know their history (which after all is our history)
and what they've overcome to get where they are. There will be better
books than this, and I look forward to them, but this is an adequate start.